Underwater World - Idle Desktop Colony Building Simulator

Introduction

Underwater World - Idle Desktop Colony Building Simulator is a small idle building game with an unusual pitch: rather than sitting in a conventional window, it's designed to run as your active desktop wallpaper, an underwater colony ticking away quietly behind your icons. Developed jointly by Overlay Games and AnretanDEV, it launched on Steam on 9 September 2022 at NZ$7.39. Almost four years later, it has attracted just 7 English-language reviews — this review read every one of them.

A thin sample, read in full

Steam's own system won't assign a score to a game with this few reviews, and normally that alone would be reason for caution rather than alarm. The three positive reviews here are brief and positive in the way small-sample reviews often are — "a wonderful game with beautiful graphics," one reads, praising the underwater map and the colony-building loop as genuinely relaxing. Nothing in them contradicts the negative reviews' specific technical complaints; they simply don't address those issues at all.

What the negative reviews actually describe

This is where a thin sample becomes worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as statistically noisy. All three negative reviews report specific, technical problems, and two of them describe the same underlying issue independently and in detail. "This game uses deceptive marketing practices," one warns. "Even if you play a few minutes, if you don't actively uninstall it after shutting it down... it will keep running in the background and you will be ineligible for a refund." A second, far more detailed account goes further: "THIS GAME SETS ITSELF AS YOUR ACTIVE DESKTOP WALLPAPER AND MUST BE UNINSTALLED OR SHUT DOWN VIA THE TASK MANAGER AFTER YOU STOP PLAYING," reporting that the software launched itself and ran for 56 hours without the reviewer's knowledge, silently pushing their Steam-tracked playtime well past the platform's own 2-hour refund eligibility threshold.

A third negative review complicates that picture rather than simply confirming it: this reviewer reports the opposite experience, saying the advertised wallpaper mode "does not work at all" on their system, and that they instead had to manually delete a specific Windows registry value just to get the basic interface functioning. Read together, the three accounts don't describe one clean, consistent bug — they describe unreliable, system-dependent behaviour around exactly the feature (background/wallpaper execution) that's central to the game's own pitch. This review has no way to independently confirm what the software does on a live desktop first-hand, but three separate, specific, and detailed accounts of exactly this kind of behaviour is a real warning worth passing on plainly, not something to soften into a vague "some users report issues."

What little simulation is here

Setting the background-execution question aside, the detailed negative review's account of the actual colony-building loop is unflattering on its own terms: "the economy / simulation part barely exists," it reports, describing being able to place energy generators, mines, storage and shields "basically without constraints" once a few building types are unlocked. The same review notes a design contradiction worth flagging directly — resource gathering pauses whenever the window loses Windows input focus, meaning the "leave it running as your wallpaper" pitch doesn't actually deliver background progress, only a background render.

Verdict

Underwater World is cheap, and its underwater colony-building pitch is a reasonable, if thin, idea on paper. But this review's full read of its tiny 7-review sample surfaces something more concrete than typical small-scope indie roughness: three independent negative reviews describing real, specific problems with how the software behaves once launched, two of them pointing at the same risk — unexpected background execution that could cost a buyer their Steam refund window without warning. Combined with reports of a near-nonexistent underlying simulation and no updates since December 2022, there's little here to offset that risk.